“... I.’ In his recent critical collection, The Position of the Body, Richard Stern observes that his home town, Chicago, used to represent authenticity for American literature: ‘With Chicago, the word “real” comes to mind. Farce amid grimness. Fires and fists, strikes, riots, clubs and cops, machine tools and machine politics, crooks and cardinals.’ But ...”

“... Lord Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, single shareholder in the late lamented Millennium Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt spoon-removers, young men who read newspapers for him and blunt Irish fixers chewing on unrequired advice ...”

“... One of the first traditionalists to complain when Home Secretary Douglas Hurd referred the case of the Guildford Four to the Court of Appeal was Ivor Stanbrook, Tory MP for Orpington. Mr Stanbrook was worried about the effect on British justice of all this questioning of verdicts in celebrated criminal cases. Yet when the Guildford Four were freed after the Director of Public Prosecutions decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to sustain their conviction, Mr Stanbrook hailed the decision as a ‘vindication of British justice ...”

“... specialists should receive the training and exposure which generate competence and expertise. Now Lord Mackay, a new Lord Chancellor whose openness and intelligence are an undeserved windfall for the Cabinet, is right when he says that a specialist corps of advocates will undoubtedly survive the Green Papers. It will ...”

“... to write a biography of the Empress. Margaret Laing is invited round to lunch with her publisher, Lord Longford, to straighten out her biography of the Shah. Rather late in the day Lord Weidenfeld suggests that Lord Chalfont take three years off to do a biography of Ashraf! And this after ...”

“... serving sentences in English jails. Headlines announced that IRA killers had been ‘sent home’ (‘home’ being another maximum-security prison in a different part of Britain). Major, we were told, was ‘livid’ and demanding an inquiry. Lord Tebbit was outraged. It was a ...”

“... it, of all hands, to be mightily and diligently looked into and cared for.’ On 18 August the Lord High Admiral, Howard of Effingham, wrote from his flagship, ‘Some made little account of Spanish force by sea, but I do warrant you, all this world never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means ...”

“... Little Willie, becomes engaged to Lucy Horsehurst, the nymphomaniacal daughter of the amiable Lord Cravenburn, the only imperial dignitary who could be persuaded to attend (a reference to the fact that the organising committee failed to attract even minor royalty, and disregarding such helpful suggestions as Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw and ...”

“... He had hoped to visit, among others, Erasmus Darwin, but finding the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set ...”

“... only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic episode in the ...”

“... fairway, the author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was already melting under the impact of A.J.B. Lord Vansittart, a junior at the Foreign Office when Balfour was foreign secretary, confessed that he found it ‘hopeless to avoid devotion’. The secret of Balfour’s charm was his nonchalance. Staying cool seemed to be his only rule. Vansittart thought that ...”

“... book​ could be written about British prime ministers and Zionism. It might begin in 1840, when Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister-to-be, received a letter from his stepson-in-law Lord Ashley, an MP better known later as Lord Shaftesbury, the Tory philanthropist ...”

“... councils in England, became not all that many years later the most right-wing, authoritarian home secretary in living memory. Stephen Pollard’s biography tells us what happened but it doesn’t quite tell us why. One of the reasons for Blunkett’s status in contemporary politics is that he was born into real hardship, a qualification which is much ...”

“... by ship, he had shot off a sheaf of telegrams to the new (post-Stalin) Soviet leadership, causing Lord Salisbury to threaten resignation for the umpteenth time. But it was all foolish and in vain. When he heard he’d won the Nobel Prize (in 1953, for his war memoirs) he became tremendously excited until told that it was for Literature: ‘His face ...”

“... Lord Todd’s describing himself as ‘a chemist’ is not mock modesty but a true representation of how he sees himself and chooses to be seen by others – no ordinary chemist, mind you, but the supremo of British chemistry for very many years and a figure of world rank as well. He is a Nobel Laureate and a peer and has been President of the Royal Society and the Head of a Cambridge College; he has earned, too, what must surely be the rarest and most prestigious of all doubles – membership of our own Order of Merit and of the Order Pour le Mérite, the German model of our own ...”